In 1990, Saddam Hussein did not understand that the
world had changed with the fall of the Wall. He thought that the USSR would
protect him from America after the invasion of Kuwait, and paid dearly for his
mistake. Abandoned by the Soviets, Iraq had to bear the cost, first of a war
lost, and second of international sanctions, on a scale and harshness still
unmatched today.
On the 6th of August, 1990, four days
after the invasion of Kuwait, the Security Council adopted, with the approval
of its five permanent members, Resolution 661 implementing an overall embargo
on imports from, and exports to Iraq, and on all financial movements. It
envisaged a kind of safety valve for the supply of humanitarian goods, but this
provision did not come into effect until 1996, in the form of the “Oil for
Food” program, because of Iraq’s initial resistance to further controls. After
the liberation of Kuwait, Resolution 687, adopted on the 3rd of
April, 1991, again with the assent of the five Permanent Members, launched the
search and destruction of all nuclear, biological and chemical weapons, and of
missiles over a 150 kilometer range. Two days later, Resolution 688 condemned
the repression of civilian populations, especially the Kurds, and opened the
way to the famous “right of humanitarian intervention”. Finally, moving beyond
the decisions of the Security Council, the United States, Great-Britain and
France set up two no-fly zones, one as soon as April 2011 in Northern Iraq, to
protect the Kurds, the second in the South on the following year, to protect
Shi’a populations.
Over the years, the toll inflicted by the embargo on
Iraqis’ health and welfare raised growing questions in the international
opinion. Humanitarian NGOs started producing reports detailing how sanctions
were entailing hundreds of thousands deaths, especially among children. In
1997, the French president, Jacques Chirac, declared at an international Summit
in Hanoi : “Our goal is to convince, not to compel. I have never seen a
policy of sanctions producing anything positive.” The year before, France had
stopped contributing to the Northern no-fly zone. It withdrew from the Southern
one in 1999. In the meantime, Iraq was bearing grudgingly the international
inspections set up by Resolution 687. By December, 1998, the United States
inflicted on the country a wave of targeted strikes, in principle to degrade
its suspected WMD capacities, more likely to help topple Saddam Hussein’s
regime. But the Regime held on, and a new war had to be launched in 2003 to
finally bring it down.
How do sanctions against Iran compare to such a
history? First, Russia, succeeding the USSR, and China, do not look at the
world as in 1990, and have developed growing reservations regarding the use of
sanctions. And the Iranian case, in its outset, did not carry a violation of
international law as blatant as the Iraqi case, which saw the massive
aggression of a UN member state by another member state. Russia and China have
consequently refused to endorse an embargo expanding beyond the points of
contention, i.e. nuclear, military and ballistic. These sanctions having
produced but a feeble impression on the Iranian regime, the United States and
the European Union have resolved to resort to their own additional sanctions,
interrupting all oil-related business, and progressively drying up all
financial flows with Iran. And in order to reinforce the efficiency of these
sanctions, the United States has set up “secondary sanctions”, compelling third
parties to join in. In the past, such a practice had been strongly opposed by
the European Union. This time, it has quietly endorsed US pressures on a vast
array of countries, especially in Asia, to convince them to reduce their
purchases of Iranian oil, and to interrupt their monetary transactions with
Tehran, except for trade expressed in their national currencies. In spite of
its unwavering support, the European Union has been submitted, like everyone
else, to the pressures of the American Administration and Congress, for
instance when the question arose to forbid to Iranians banks access to European
automated banking services.
But this new architecture of sanctions suffers from a
lesser legitimacy than the Iraqi set of sanctions, which was placed entirely
under the aegis of the United Nations. The great consumers of Iranian
oil : China, Japan, India, South Korea… have reduced their purchases only
in the proportion required to avoid punition by the United States. True,
Iranian oil exports have been cut by half. But this oil is sold at a price fluctuating
between 80 and 100 dollars per barrel, as the price of the barrel seldom went
over 30 dollars from the birth of the Islamic Republic, in 1979, to the
election of Ahmadinejad as president, in 2005. Furthermore, an unknown share of
the Iranian production is, in all likelihood, sold under other pavilions. And
quite obviously, some banks exotic enough to be able to dodge American
monitoring succeed, at the proper price, in managing exchanges between Iran and
the outer world.
True also, the Iranian riyal has lost about two thirds
of its value in dollars, but it was until recently, as a matter of prestige,
maintained at a grossly overrated level. Its present value is much closer to
the economic truth. This correction has certainly encouraged inflation. But it
offers margins of competitiveness quite unheard of to the Iranian industry,
which was until now stifled by Asian productions. It offers an opportunity to
raise the proportion of non-oil exports in the Iranian trade balance. This
devaluation has therefore positive aspects.
Of course, the Iranian population pays dearly for
these sanctions, and also for the erratic management of the economy by the
Iranian government, as was the case in Saddam’s Iraq. In theory, imports of
humanitarian products, like food and medicine, do not fall under the embargo.
But the complexity of the system make such imports more or less impracticable,
except for exceptional cases as when some giant of the food industry, like
Cargill, deems it convenient to sell corn to Iran. All things considered, the
shock created by sanctions is not as heavy as it was in Iraq. The sheer size of
the Iranian population – 75 million inhabitants versus 20 million Iraqis at the
turn of the century – acts as an absorber. And in spite of serious shortcomings,
the level of self-sufficiency of the Iranian economy, in agriculture as well as
in industry, is clearly higher than in Saddam’s Iraq.
Could the Iranians be less resigned than the Iraqis to
be taken as hostages by their government in its quarrel with the outer world?
If they were to rise from submission, would the Regime be ready to show itself
as merciless as the former master of Baghdad, or the present master of
Damascus? The Iranian civil society has already paid a heavy price for the
upheavals entailed by the rigged elections of 2009. It is not in a position to
challenge again the Regime. On the other hand, this Regime will probably
hesitate to rig the upcoming presidential election as grossly as last time. All
in all, one does not see coming from the horizon the internal crisis which
could undermine the Islamic Republic to a point where it would have no other
choice but to give up to the West.
And the present nuclear showdown is here to last quite
a while. The last round of negotiation in Almaty, at the beginning of April,
has revealed a wide and enduring gap between the parties, even if there has
been some progress in the quality of their exchanges. A breakthrough seems for
the moment out of reach, all the more as Iran is going to be absorbed in the
presidential election and the installation of its new president until the end
of summer.
In order to hasten the moment when Iran’s economic
collapse and political isolation would drive it to a full surrender, can we
envisage to exert on the Regime even higher pressure? François Hollande, the
French president, has been declaring at the beginning of March : “France
will take its responsibilities in order to maintain pressure, to harden the
sanctions, so as the Iranian rulers abide by their international commitments,
by the Security Council’s resolutions.” But then, it becomes somehow difficult
to see what kind of crushing sanctions could complement the present ones. Such
sanctions will not be able to rely on the legitimacy of the United Nations.
They will have to take into account the low motivation of most third countries
to partake in such an escalation, as well as the growing ingenuity of Iran in
dodging the embargo. One cannot therefore exclude that, as in the Iraqi case,
sanctions will not be able to bring the desired outcome.
Then, again as in the Iraqi case, comes the temptation
to resort to force. But Tehran is taking great care to avoid offering to the
United States the opportunity to intervene. It stays cautiously behind the red
line defined by President Obama as the beginning of the production of a nuclear
explosive device. It stays even behind the red line defined by Prime Minister
Netanyahu as the possession of enough 20% enriched uranium to obtain in a
matter of weeks, by further enrichment, enough highly enriched uranium for a
first atomic bomb. And the US administration will dare no more to build a case
like the one which led to the invasion of Iraq. To show how times have changed,
the US Intelligence Community, much to the chagrin of the neoconservatives
eager to knock heads with Iran, reminds regularly since 2007 that the Islamic
Republic has interrupted its clandestine nuclear program by the end of 2003,
and has not, since then, taken the decision to produce nuclear weapons.
There should be a third way to come out of the crisis,
but it implies a deep change in the parameters of the negotiation. There is one
idea, and only one, on which such a change could be built : the
recognition of Iran’s right to enrich, but enshrined in a system of controls
powerful enough to practically forbid any access to the Bomb. Ali Khamenei,
leader of the revolution, has recently supported such a formula in a public
speech. Now, if there were an interest in exploring it, the initiative rather
belongs to the West. It belongs in reality to Barack Obama, the sole Western
leader in a position to boost the negotiation as the European leaders have
chosen to stand back, for lack of imagination, lack of cohesion, and lack of
political will.
